My first computer. Ordered the day it was released after saving up 50% of the £70 and my father added the other 50%. Finished secondary school whilst waiting f

My first computer. Ordered the day it was released after saving up 50% of the £70 and my father added the other 50%. Finished secondary school whilst waiting for it to be delivered, it arrived the following week - the first week of June 1981. I spent the intervening months teaching myself BASIC programming from the total of 3 books on programming in the local library. I remember the day it arrived well; I was busy cleaning house and didn't realise the postman had left the parcel in the kitchen until I stopped for a break a couple of hours later. Had it unboxed and connected in a flash and I was still to be found lying on the lounge carpet in front of the television programming it (in BASIC) at midnight. Started my agricultural apprenticeship the following week and continued programming late into the nights, quickly moving to write pure Z80 assembly language code. Dropped the apprenticeship a year later, went self-employed, and been hacking ever since. I still miss those days of actually counting the clock cycles of different instruction combinations to find the most efficient code via the look-up tables in the back of Rodnay Zak's "Programming the Z80". Oh, and we had to manually enter the hex codes of the instructions to write those programs - before there was a decent assembler available. I recall adding a full-size mechanical keyboard, a 16KB RAM-pack, and a weird multi-port expansion dock that had add-on modules (like a light pen) built into cassette tape cases and connected via a single-in-line pin connection. I still have that original ZX81 along with a UHF<->VGA signal adapter. Time to fetch it out of its shoe box and fire up the nostalgia.